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Save the snake oil for the Indians

Which wine goes with which food? Which cable goes with which preamp. A cable is not a control element. It is not an attenuator or an amplifier. It has one purpose only and that is to connect two points in a circuit without distorting the signal, period. Comparing cables to each other is the first way you start misleading the suckers down the path of selling to them. There is only one valid comparison for a cable and that is to a shunt. Anything else is a deliberately flawed test. If it sounds identical to a shunt, it is performing perfectly and no improvement is possible. If it doesn't, it is flawed and should be discarded NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU LIKE THE DISTORTION IT PRODUCES. As a control element, a cable stinks. It is usually barely perceptable in its effect if it has any at all. Its effect cannot be adjusted. Its effect if it has any is unpredictable, and it is expensive. And if there is even the slighest shred of truth about some of them having to be broken it because of the materials it is made out of, it is unstable as well. The only engineers who buy into the cable crap are those in the audiophile equipment manufactucturing and selling business themselves working on the premise that they'll pretend your scam is true if you pretend theirs is too. When I lived in California, I discovered that this for many of them is their philosophy of life.

As for fluids used on cds, anything which leaves a haze through which the optical system cannot penetrate completely forces the cd player's built in error bit correction system to operate by interpolating to recover or disguise lost bits. There are apparantly a lot of people who like that form of distortion too.

We're not all ignorant idiots here.

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  Kimber Kable  

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